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One thing is certain: if society at large fails to come to terms with its people – what a paradox – people will spread over the globe and be at home nowhere, for it is in the nature of countless pseudo places made today that they are all the same. ciam and Team 10 Throughout the 1930s and 1940s ciam had remained very much in the hands of Le Corbusier and Giedion. The fourth ciam congress, held aboard the S.S. Patris II in 1933, produced (ten years later) the document published by Le Corbusier as the “Athens Charter,” which became the definitive statement of the organization's objectives and planning policies. It was in many of its details synonymous with Le Corbusier's “Radiant City” proposals. With the collapse of modernism in Germany in the mid-1930s, Le Corbusier assumed an even more powerful role. The fifth ciam congress was held in Paris in 1937, and Le Corbusier arranged his Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the Paris Exposition as a propaganda display for the organization. The theme was the functional city. The Spaniard José Luis Sert and the Dutchman Cornelis van Eesteren joined the inner circle of the organization in these years, but the German occupation of much of Europe in the 1940s dispersed once again the remnants of ciam. The saving grace for ciam turned out to be England, which after the founding of mars (Modern Architecture Research Group) in 1933 had grown increasingly active. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are in the presence of anachronism, nostalgia, and, probably, frivolity. 1968 Architectural theory is conventionally said to be a phenomenon born out of a tradition and therefore one that generally operates by evolution rather than by revolution. In quiet times this is generally the case. Very little, if anything, is ever new to architectural theory, and often generations of architects grapple with the very same issues, albeit within a changing historical context. But theory, too, is almost always visibly shaken by momentous intellectual, political, and economic events. The intellectual foment surrounding the Enlightenment defined one such moment within the course of Western history. World War I made its mark on theory, and the Great Depression ushered in a new era of thought. The year 1968 seems to define another such moment. Nineteen sixty-eight was above all a year of political convulsion and violence. In Europe the year opened and closed with the uplifting and disheartening events in Czechoslovakia. In early January, Antonín Novotný, the first secretary of the Communist Party, was ousted from his position by the Slovak Alexander Dubček (1927–93), who promised “socialism with a human face.” With the further removal of Novotný loyalists from the cabinet in March, the “Prague Spring” became a cause of worldwide celebration. The country's censorship laws were quickly revoked, and people in the streets reveled in their newfound freedom of expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suddenly a bright light appeared before my eyes. I saw objects distinctly where before I had only caught a glimpse of haze and clouds. The Enlightenment in France The relative lull in architectural debate in the first decades of eighteenth-century France mirrors a more pervasive lethargy that both shifted and sapped intellectual performance at large. Rococo theory, on the one hand, turned the focus of architectural attention from monumental practice toward residential planning – a trend discernible in the three editions (the second and third each greatly expanded) of Augustin-Charles d'Aviler's Cours d'architecture (Course of architecture; 1691, 1710, 1738) and Jacques-François Blondel's De la distribution des maisons de plaisance, et de la décoration des edifices en general (On the layout of country seats, and the decoration of edifices in general; 1737–8). French rococo theory, on the other hand, was a body of thought planted on soft political and economic underpinnings. The great promise of the early reign of Louis XIV soon dissipated. The fate of his cultural renaissance in France was largely sealed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which sent tens of thousands of productive Huguenots into permanent religious exile. The whimsical overbuilding at Versailles and the disastrous War of Spanish Succession (1701–13) further depleted state coffers and undermined French morale, so much so that when the corpse of the monarch was wheeled to its burial place at Saint Denis in 1715, it was jeered along the way by angry mobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

But it appears very clearly to me, that the human figure never supplied the architect with any of his ideas. The Legacy of Jones and Wren There are many reasons for Great Britain's relatively independent course of intellectual development in the eighteenth century. Politically, the two most significant events were the revolution of 1688 and the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. The former resulted in constitutional reforms that enhanced liberty of expression and stabilized the governing process, while the latter concluded a dozen years of war with France and instilled in the British both pride and an ambition for international political standing. The ascension of the House of Hanover in 1715 further consolidated these gains and led to a period of unmatched colonial expansion and economic prosperity that lasted until midcentury. Attention to such luxuries as art and architecture was of course congenial with these developments. Thus Britain over the course of the century increasingly competed with France and Italy on the European cultural stage, yet with some unique traits in its national makeup. Until late in the century, it possessed no academic structure in the arts and hence had no organizational means of defining a unified set of artistic beliefs. British architects learned their trade either as apprentices in offices or through self-education by reading the principal texts of the Italian Renaissance or French classicism. Where advanced schooling was desired, one embarked on a tour of the south to imbibe the classical tradition firsthand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The taste of our century, or at least of our nation, is different from that of the Ancients. François Blondel and the French Academic Tradition Architectural thought in France at the start of the seventeenth century, like that in Italy and Spain, was predicated on the notion that the art of architecture participated in a divinely sanctioned cosmology or natural order: a stable grammar of eternally valid forms, numbers, and proportional relations transmitted to the present from ancient times. Jean Bautista Villalpanda, in his 1604 commentary on the prophet Ezekiel and Solomon's Temple, attempted to prove that these numbers and proportions not only were compatible with the Vitruvian tradition but were given to Solomon directly by God himself. Within a few years, this tenet, more broadly considered, would meet philosophical resistance in the person of René Descartes (1596–1650). In his Rules for the Direction of the Mind, written sometime before 1628, Descartes noted: “Concerning objects proposed for study, we ought to investigate what we can clearly and evidently intuit or deduce with certainty, and not what other people have thought or what we ourselves conjecture.” In this clash of two different systems of values – inherited tradition and the confident power of human reason – resounds the first stirrings of modern theory. Descartes's third “rule,” as he termed it, is even richer in its implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Funny you can be so lonely with all these folks around. When I come out of the country hither to the City methinks I come into another world, even out of darkness into light. The popular culture of cities and towns is, by its nature, a derived culture. Towns were a relatively late development; they could arise only when agriculture had been sufficiently developed to yield a surplus for their support, and the ratio of urban to rural population in traditional societies has always been low. Towns derived not only their basic food supply from the countryside, but also their population. Urban death-rates were generally higher, and birth-rates lower than in the countryside, and the net reproduction rate was for much of the time less than unity. There thus had to be a migration from the country to the town, and the vast number of locative personal names, indicating a village or place of origin, gives some idea of the distances covered by the migrants. Many towns had no precisely known point of origin. They had grown in response to human needs, and in some form or other seemed to have existed from time immemorial. Some had been established by the Romans, had decayed and had been abandoned, leaving only an infrastructure of roads and the rumour that there had once been a city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]